#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# For correct results, use on a terminal expecting utf-8
use strict;
use Email::MIME;

sub new_part ($$) {
    my ($type, $body) = @_;
    my ($part) = Email::MIME->create(
        attributes => {
            content_type => $type,
            charset => 'utf-8',
            encoding => '8bit',
        }, body_str => $body,
    );
    do { $part->header_set($_) } foreach qw/Date MIME-Version/;
    return $part;
}

# Normally, this would be actual utf-8 under "use utf8"
my $text = "Not latin: \x{30ab}\x{30bf}\x{30ab}\x{30ca}";
my $html = "<p><i>$text</i></p>";

my $m = Email::MIME->create(header_str => [
    To => 'a@example.com',
    From => 'b@example.com',
    Subject => 'Test',
], attributes => {
    content_type => 'multipart/alternative',
}, parts => [
    new_part('text/html', $html),
    new_part('text/plain', $text)
]);

print $m->as_string;

##</code><code>##

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
# vim:fileencoding=utf-8
# PuTTY option: Remote character set = UTF-8
# my locale: en_US.UTF-8 (LANG and all LC_* except LC_ALL="")
use warnings;
use strict;
use utf8;
use MIME::Lite;
use MIME::Base64;
my $m = MIME::Lite->new(To => 'a@example.com',
  From => 'b@example.net', Subject => 'Test',
  Type => 'TEXT',
  # Perlmonks safe encoding with same result
  Data => "Not latin: \x{30ab}\x{30bf}\x{30ab}\x{30ca}\n");
my $s = $m->as_string;
print "UTF-8 flag: ", utf8::is_utf8($s), "\n";
binmode(STDOUT, ':raw');
print $s; # warns: wide char in print
print encode_base64($s); # dies: wide char in sub entry